In the mid-nineties, according to the report, one in sixty-four graduates were in design programs. A decade later, the number was one in sixteen. “Design is not incidental to modern economies but integral; not a part of success but the heart of success; and not a sideshow but the centrepiece,” Brown said. His government commissioned official reports to find the economic potential of design in its industries and found that design-centered companies “saw a turnover rise by fourteen percent and profits by nine percent.”22No doubt Jony’s father, Mike, had made a huge contribution to the rise of design in his native land and he was honored thusly. In 1999, in recognition of his contributions to British design education, Mike Ive was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE).
In 2003, Jony was appointed a member of Royal Designers for Industry; in 2004, he was awarded the RSA Benjamin Franklin Medal; and in 2005, he won what was to be the first in a string of prestigious awards from the British Design & Art Direction (D&AD). In 2006, he was named Commander of the Order of the British Empire (a higher award than his father’s OBE)
Jony didn’t make a public comment about the award at the time, but in a statement, Apple said: “We are as proud as could be that Jony is receiving such a prestigious commendation.”23
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Although his designs were drawing much notice, bigger work (quite literally) was still ahead. The year 2003 saw the release of the seventeen-inch PowerBook. It was a monster laptop, but none of Apple’s marketing materials mentioned Jony’s proudest innovations, which included its internal frame and a clutch mechanism in the lid hinge.
The variable-rate clutch he devised had less resistance in the near-closed position, allowing the lid to be opened with one hand without the bottom of the laptop lifting off the desk. A consuming attention to detail contributed to the user experience, even though few users have any idea how much work went into it.
Jony was proud of the PowerBook’s construction, and dismantled one for his 2003 Designer of the Year exhibition at the Design Museum. “We took [it] to pieces so you can see our preoccupation with a part of the product that you’ll never see,” Jony said. “I think—I hope—there’s an inherent beauty in the internal architecture of the product and the way we’re fabricating the product: laser-welding different gauges of aluminium together and so on. Very often people assume that it’s only if it’s a smaller volume production—batch production—that people will really be caring about all of the details. I think one thing that is typical about our work at Apple is caring about the smallest details. I think sometimes that’s seen as more of a craft activity than a mass-production one. But I think that’s very important.”24
Richard Powell, founder and director of the famous design firm Seymourpowell, liked what he saw. “When you talk to Jony Ive, his eyes sparkle with the memory of a design challenge overcome, a problem solved, a material found. He becomes animated about a surface perfected and a process explored. For Ive, nothing is left to chance; everything must be deeply considered.”25
Powell saw Jony’s focus as defining. “Innovation,” he wrote, “is rarely about a big idea; more usually it’s about a series of small ideas brought together in a new and better way. Jony’s fanatical drive for excellence is, I think, most evident in the stuff beyond the obvious; the stuff you perhaps don’t notice that much, but which makes a difference to how you interact with the product, how you feel about it.”
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The iPod was becoming a monster hit, suddenly as important to Apple as the Mac line. In 2004, the iPod was spun off into a separate division and Rubinstein, formerly head of all hardware, put in charge. In executive meetings, Jobs and his team started wondering what else the company might get into. An Apple-branded car and digital cameras were some of the ideas knocked around.26
In 2005, Jobs promoted Jony to senior vice president of industrial design, elevating him to the same senior level as Rubinstein. Jony had reported to Rubinstein, with whom he fought constantly. Now Jony answered only to Jobs.
Jony and Ruby had been getting into regular shouting matches. Jony was always pushing the envelope, constantly challenging how things were made and designed. It was Rubinstein’s job to get products out the door, and he frequently balked at Jony’s demands. According to a former designer who worked with the pair, Rubinstein avoided Jony and the studio as much as possible and, if he did have to meet with Jony, he became visibly agitated. “Jon’s blood would just boil whenever he had to go into the studio and deal with Jony,” said one source.
The relationship was equally problematic for Jony. The confrontation that had been brewing for years finally happened. Jony reportedly went to Jobs and told him, “It’s him or me.”
Despite Rubinstein’s essential role in the development of the iPod and scores of other products, Jobs chose Jony.27In October 2005, Apple issued a press release that framed Rubinstein’s exit as a long-deserved retirement. He was replaced as head of the iPod division by Tony Fadell.28Rubinstein would spend some time building a house in Mexico before later becoming CEO of Palm and developing a rival to the iPhone.
Speaking of the affair years later, Rubinstein was diplomatic about his relationship with Jony. “Jony and I worked very closely over many years and did a lot of work together. My job was to instill balance and get products out the door. Sometimes working with Jony could be difficult.”29
Even if they had their hard moments, during their shared time at Apple, Jony and his then-superior Rubinstein steered the company’s design language through several phases, moving from multicolored plastic to monochrome plastic and on to a range of metals. Importantly, each stage marked a growing sophistication in the tandem of design and manufacturing.
That the manufacturing methods became a larger and larger part of the design process undoubtedly added to the tension between the two men. The design team was no longer concerned with merely how the products looked and worked. Their brief became how the products were made, and Jony’s team, which had always spent a lot of time designing products, invested more and more time in figuring out how to manufacture them.
Former design team leader Bob Brunner gave his view on the travails: “Apple designers spend ten percent of their time doing traditional industrial design: coming up with ideas, drawing, making models, brainstorming. They spend ninety percent of their time working with manufacturing, figuring out how to implement their ideas.”30It’s little wonder, then, than Jony’s star was ascendant in a company where design and materials had become the industrial equivalent of conjoined twins.
Jony’s outlook on the cost of R&D and development work was simple: He didn’t want to know about it. As he told a former engineer who worked in the operations group, “I do not want any of my guys thinking about cost. They should not even care about the cost because that is not their job.”
To some in the company, it seemed as if Jony reported to no one, not even Jobs. Reportedly he told suppliers, “Imagine I have a bucket of money in my hand. I will let you pull out as much as you want to make this happen,” said the operations engineer. Discussions between Jony’s group and product development and operations tended to go in one direction, from the designers to production.
As the operations executive summed it up, “ID rules Apple.”
Streamlining Manufacturing
The intimacy of design and manufacturing is what led apple to China. Apple’s shift to manufacturing its products in China has been credited to Tim Cook, the company’s CEO and Jobs’s chosen successor.
Jobs himself had been managing Apple’s suppliers and factories when he hired Cook in 1998 as senior vice president of operations. Raised in Robertsdale, Alabama, Cook was formerly an operations executive at Compaq and had spent twelve years at IBM. With his cool demeanor, he bonded immediately with the volatile Jobs, who had already rejected a number of candidates for the operations manager role, walking out of at least one interview within five minutes. But the formidable CEO connected with Cook and offered him the job, giving him an office near his own.
Cook inherited the unenviable task of overhauling Apple’s manufacturing and distribution networks, which were in a notorious state of disorganization. Apple had its own factories operating in California (Sacramento), Ireland (Cork) and Singapore. The three sites produced motherboards and assembled the same products that, in theory, were intended for sale in their respective geographies, America, Europe and Asia. In practice, however, motherboards were often shipped from Singapore to Cork for partial assembly, then shipped back to Singapore for final assembly, and then to the United States for sale. “As you can imagine,” Cook said of the arrangement, “the costs weren’t so good, and the cycle times weren’t that good.”31
Jobs’s streamlining of Apple’s product line to just four products simplified things. Instead of four motherboards for desktops, there was now just one. The machines in his 2×2 product matrix shared as many common parts as possible, and instead of using exotic Mac-only technology, they used industry standard parts shared by other PC manufacturers.
Still, Apple’s factories were costly and inefficient, so Cook started using outside manufacturers. Cook began by visiting every supplier that did business with Apple. He struck hard bargains, consolidated suppliers and encouraged suppliers to move their own factories close to assembly plants.
When Apple introduced the iMac in 1998, it was initially made at the three Apple factories, though LG made the iMac cases and monitors. In February 1999, the company shifted streams, outsourcing the iMac entirely to LG and selling off Apple’s factories. In 2000, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Ltd. took over iMac production. The electronics manufacturer, based in Taiwan, is better known internationally as Foxconn.
Cook would do the same thing with laptops, shifting production from Apple factories to Quanta Computer in Taiwan (for the PowerBook) and Alpha Top Corporation in Taiwan (the iBook). By moving production to outside partners, Cook solved one of Apple’s biggest headaches: inventory, namely, stock sitting in storage. The more parts and machines Apple had in its warehouses, the more money the inventory cost the company. Warehouses full of unsold machines had nearly sunk Apple in 1996, so the new normal had become the less inventory, the better. Cook once referred to inventory as “not only evil, but fundamentally evil.”32
Too much inventory was a consequence of forecasting sales in advance, which had always been mostly a matter of guesswork. Traditionally a company would manufacture goods to suit expected orders over a period of months; that also meant that each machine that was built, shipped and stored cost money until it was sold.
Cook wanted a better system, looking to harness emerging information technology programs that made it possible to fulfill actual customer needs. He created a state-of-the-art IT system that allowed Apple to build in response to demand. He helped set up a complex enterprise-resource-planning system (ERP). The Intranet-based system hooked directly into the IT systems at Apple’s parts suppliers, manufacturers and resellers, giving Cook a detailed view of Apple’s entire supply chain, from screws to customers. With that data, he could manage daily production on the basis of weekly sales forecasts and keep precise tabs on stock at its resellers. He could tell if CompUSA had excess inventory or if it was running out of stock. Later, the ERP was extended into Apple’s own retail stores and became so precise it tracked and reported sales every four minutes.
The ERP allowed Apple to build computers only if they were needed, so-called just-in-time production. And it allowed parts to be left in suppliers’ warehouses until they were required.
Within seven months of Cook’s arrival, Apple had reduced its on-hand inventory from thirty days to six. By 1999, inventory had been reduced to just two days, beating by far the industry’s gold standard, Dell. Thanks to improved operations, Cook was credited with playing a big part in stemming Apple’s losses and returning it to profitability.
Over the years, Cook fine-tuned the system until it was capable of delivering millions of products in secret just in time for massive product launches, accounting for much of Apple’s massive growth. In overseeing Apple production lines, Cook successfully managed not only to keep inventory low but to keep profit margins high at Apple. The company could never have grown so rapidly and so large without such operational excellence. Just as Jony and the design team designed great products, Cook and his team figured out how to produce them in their millions—and deliver them all over the world, on time and in utmost secrecy.
Aloo-MIN-ee-um
Another reason Apple shifted manufacturing to China was that the design team started designing products in aluminum, and that’s where the supply chain was located. The Titanium PowerBook G4 had been a big hit, but titanium is an expensive and difficult metal to work with. Plus, it had to be coated in a metallic paint to protect against scratches and fingerprints, but the paint had a tendency to flake off. When Jony’s first prototypes for the iPod mini didn’t work in acrylic and steel, he shifted to anodized aluminum.
According to his design team’s research, aluminum looked like a good material for laptop cases and iPods. It is strong and light, and it can be finished in a range of colors when an anodized coating is bonded chemically to the metal. At that stage, Jony and his crew knew little about aluminum manufacturing, so they started researching camera manufacturers like Sony, which produced a lot of cameras in aluminum.
These Japanese-based manufacturers turned out elegant, long-lasting and well-made products. But the aluminum’s point of origin was in China. “We got introduced into that supply chain,” said Satzger. “I remember many trips to go over to understand how you do things with aluminum.”
Apple has taken much flak for outsourcing to China, but when Jony and the team first started using aluminum, they tried to work with manufacturers stateside. Satzger, who was in charge of materials and finishes for Jony’s group, made the initial contacts. He researched the suppliers to find companies that could make components in the quality and quantity that Apple required.
When the design team was creating the first Mac mini, Satzger started working with a U.S.-based aluminum supplier. The directive from Tim Cook’s operations group was clear: They wanted the Mac mini to be manufactured in the United States. The U.S. supplier looked like a good bet because it was able to supply high-quality aluminum that was relatively free of impurities and would anodize well.
